French President Emmanuel Macron will address the dinner in his capacity as head of state. Several of his rival candidates will attend but will not speak.
In his speech, Crif president Francis Kalifat is expected to call for a “targeted strategy” to combat antisemitism.
As Crif, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish institutions, is organizing Thursday its annual political dinner ahead of presidential election in the country in April, its president, Francis Kalifat, said that he has not invited representatives of the ‘’extreme’’ parties.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who is running for re-election in the election although he has not yet announced it, will address the dinner in his capacity as head of state. Several of his rival candidates will attend but will not speak.
Those unwelcome politicians are Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme-right National Rally, maverick extreme-right candidate Eric Zemmour, who hails from an Algerian Jewish family but has made controversial remarks regarding French collaboration with the Nazis during WWII, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, head of the extreme left “Unsubmissive France” party.
Canceled for the previous two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the dinner will bring together leading politicians, diplomats, religious leaders and media personalities.
“The Crif dinner is a republican dinner and at the republican table, the extremes have no place,”Kalifat told French newspaper L’Opinion.
“Traditionally, the representatives of extremist parties are not invited to the dinner,” Kalifat explained. “Extremes are dangerous for France and dangerous for Jews, as history has shown us.”
“The rejection of extremes is for us a moral and political imperative,” he added
“By his extreme positions”, Eric Zemmour , who leads the ‘’Reconquest’’ party, ‘’has placed himself to the right of Marine Le Pen. By his attempts to rewrite history, he has installed himself as the leader of revisionism in our country,” said Kalifat, according to whom he is “an unwelcome guest at the Crif dinner.
The president of the Council criticized “the brutality of Zemmour’s speech, often confusing Islam and Islamism”, “his desire to repeal the memorial laws”, “his remarks on Pétain, which he seeks to rehabilitate”, his words “on Dreyfus, whose innocence he questions”. He also denounceds his words “on the victims of Toulouse (murdered by Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah in 2012) put in equivalence with their executioner and challenged in their membership of the national community because buried in Israel.’’
“But of course, beyond the political world, all components of society will be present. The religious, trade union, intellectual, artistic, media, economic, judicial, diplomatic world,’’ he said.
This dinner will be held in a particular context due to the Ukrainian crisis.
In his speech, Kalifat is expected to call for a “targeted strategy” to combat antisemitism.
In an interview with the Agence France Presse (AFP) press agency, he stated that the French government’s plans to fight racism and antisemitism, launched in 2012, 2015 and 2018 had failed to tackle the problem.
“The strategy, through comprehensive plans to fight different hatreds, is not the right one,” Kalifat said. “We have to move on to a targeted strategy, because each of the hatreds responds to different triggers.”
Kalifat also stressed that efforts to define anti-Zionism as antisemitism — initiated by President Emmanuel Macron in his speech to the Crif dinner in 20919 — had petered out.
He noted that French interior ministry’s data showed that there was a 74 percent increase in complaints to the police regarding antisemitic acts, from 339 in 2020 to 559 in 2021.
He said that many antisemitic incidents that do not result in criminal complaints.
“If we add the fact that 80 percent of the victims do not file a complaint … we have the real measure of what antisemitism represents in our country,” Kalifat said.